Is My Own Textbook Curation on the Horizon?

Back in October 2013, I had the opportunity to attend the OESIS conference in Boston.  It was a fascinating conference offering a variety of workshops that discussed technology use in the classroom. Keynote speaker, Tom Vander Ark, author of Getting Smart: How Digital Learning is Changing the World, mentioned curating your own textbook for a course. This was a new and intriguing idea for me, as the teachers in my math department are constantly looking for textbooks that adequately meet the goals of our courses. We supplement material often, either because the book we have is not challenging enough, does not cover a specific topic, or fails to provide adequate practice. Wouldn’t it make sense to put all of these supplemental resources in one place, accessible to students, and organized to meet the course objectives? I have thought, throughout the year, that this would be a great idea, but have been overwhelmed by the process, not quite sure where to begin.

I ran across the article, How to Easily Make your Own Textbook,  by Delores Gende in Edudemic, published in January 2012. In the article, she lists three steps in the development process, Aggregation, Curation and Creation. This process breakdown makes this daunting task seem more attainable. Looking ahead, this may be something I will try to do.

According to Gende, aggregation involves bookmarking information that would be used in your textbook is this first step.  I realized that I had been doing some form of this bookmarking using ScoopIt.com and Pinterest.com. I have been saving resources and articles of interest in these places for some time. Organizing my resources for textbook curation will be a new challenge. This will require me to analyze these recourses in line with my curriculum and teaching objectives. It will be important to provide interactive tools that allow my students to allow them to manipulate graphs and discover patterns. Sources for interactive tools that I will use include Geometer’s Sketchpad, Khan Academy and Applets on the Web. Finally, I will need to create the actual textbook in a place that my students can access the information easily. CK-12 provides great examples and free resources and pre-created Flexbooks to help teachers get started.

"We Touched the Future!"

One of the highlights of my spring semester was helping my geometry students understand scale-factor and similarity through design and creativity. To understand these concepts more deeply we embarked on a project to design dollhouse furniture to scale.  The students worked in small groups to plan the furniture that would go in their room. Using 123D-Design, the students developed a 3-D image of their piece of furniture. These digital creations were sent to the schools brand new MakerBot-3D printer where they came to life.  Throughout the week, the various pieces of furniture were added to the dollhouse, created by one of my students. Each day the girls looked forward to coming to class to see what new items were added. Once all of the pieces were completed, the dollhouse and its contents were given to the kindergarten class to play with in their classroom. As we left the kindergarten room, one of my high school students said, "I feel like we just touched the future. They will grow up to think 3D printers are just a common thing just like we have grown up with cellphones. My mom tells me stories about when cellphones were new. These girls will have a story about when 3D printers were new."

 "Why was this project important?", you may be asking.

1)  3D printing is rapidly growing and new uses for this technology are growing rapidly.  NASA is sending a 3D printer to the International Space Station in order to manufacture parts rather than waiting for deliveries.

2) Creativity is an important component in education. This project allowed students to be creative, exploring the features in 123D-Design that would allow them to get the results they desired. The opportunity to use the MakerBot printer and see their designs come to life motivated the students to be more creative. Sir Ken Robinson discusses the importance of creativity in his TED-Talk.

3) Making real-world connections helps students to learn and understand mathematics. NCTM President Linda Gojak stated, "Instructional programs from prekindergarten through grade 12 should enable all students to— 

• recognize and use connections among mathematical ideas;
• recognize and apply mathematics in contexts outside of mathematics."

This project supported these ideas as my student's reflection indicates, " When designing objects, it is crucial to use scale factor when designing. In architectural projects, conversion factors are used in online programs. This project allowed us to look into the eyes of an architect, which was very interesting!"